In this course we will read and reflect on the lyrics and the letters of Emily Dickinson, within and against a number of critical contexts. For the first few weeks we will acquaint ourselves with her corpus, reading deeply and widely her poetry and prose. We will then work to contextualize Dickinson’s writing within the culture, history, and politics of the mid- l9th century, focusing particularly on issues of gender, professional authorship, and the culture of domesticity. Finally, we will consider the heated critical debates surrounding editorial practices, debates about editions, and the fetishizing of manuscripts and the “electronic” Dickinson archive. (Poetry)